New Respondent Reminder Methods and the Effects on Response Rate for an Establishment Survey

This issue brief compares the 2011 and 2010 data collection cycles for the National Survey of Substance Abuse Treatment Services (N-SSATS), an annual multimode establishment survey of more than 17,000 substance abuse treatment facilities in the United States, to determine whether a new data collection strategy in 2011 affected the rate of return or overall response rate. The new multimode strategy used bulk faxes and emails (in addition to single mail and telephone reminders), as well as more frequent reminders, and had a noticeable impact on increasing the response rate for the 2011 N-SSATS.